Executive function (EF) skills are a set of attention-regulation skills involved in intentional, goal-directed behavior that include (but are not limited to) the cool EF skills of working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control, and also the hot EF skill of intentional reevaluation. These skills are inevitably expressed in goal- and…

Our ability to shift from current to alternative (e.g., past and future) perspectives (i.e., "self-projection") plays a fundamental role in accurate decision-making. We investigated 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' ability to shift perspective to reason about their future and past preferences. In Experiment 1 (N = 96), children were presented…

The aim of the present study was to explore how maternal reminiscing relates to socioemotional development during middle childhood. Specifically, analyses explored the link between maternal reminiscing and children's internalizing (emotional problems and peer problems), externalizing (hyperactivity and conduct problems) and prosocial behavior…

Spatial play in early childhood is associated with a variety of spatial and cognitive skills. However, these associations are often derived from studies in which different tasks are used across different age ranges, leaving open the question of how children's natural behaviors during spatial play develop from infancy into the early preschool…

This study investigated developmental differences in metacognitive monitoring and control in younger (5- to 6-year-old) and older (8- to 10-year-old) children's prospective memory (PM). Metacognitive monitoring was assessed by asking the children to judge their performance before (prediction) and after (postdiction) performing a resource-demanding…

This experiment tests the age at which left-to-right spatial associations found in infancy shift to culture-specific spatial biases in later childhood, for both numerical and non-numerical information. Children ages 1-5 years (N = 320) were tested within an eye-tracking paradigm which required passive viewing of a video portraying a spatial…

Various theorists have argued for the importance of a developmental approach to studying typical development (Karmiloff-Smith, 1998; Lerner, 1996; Lerner & Hood, 1986; Masten & Cicchetti, 2010; Overton, 2014; Overton & Lerner, 2012, 2014), and there are reasons to believe that this issue is even more critical to the study of…

In simple rule-switching tests, 3- and 4-year-olds can follow each of two sorting rules but sometimes make perseverative errors when switching. Older children make few errors but respond slowly when switching. These age-related changes might reflect the maturation of executive functions (e.g., inhibition). However, they might also reflect…

Language acquisition is a process embedded in social routines. Despite considerable attention in research to its social nature, little is known about developmental differences in the relative priority of certain social cues over others during early word learning. Employing an eye-tracking paradigm, we presented 14-month-old infants, 24-month-old…

Determining which dimensions of social classification are culturally significant is a developmental challenge. Some suggest this is accomplished by differentially privileging intrinsic visual cues over nonintrinsic cues (Atran, 1990; Gil-White, 2001), whereas others point to the role of noun labels as more general promoters of kind-based reasoning…

Recent studies suggest that there appears to be a similar developmental sequence in the understanding of mental states in both internal-state language and in standard theory-of-mind tasks. These findings suggest possible developmental relations between children's ability to talk and think about the mind. Two experiments investigated the concurrent…

When learning object function, infants must detect relations among features--for example, that squeezing is associated with squeaking or that objects with wheels roll. Previously, Perone and Oakes (2006) found 10-month-old infants were sensitive to relations between object appearances and actions, but not to relations between appearances and…

In "The Foundations of Mind," Jean Mandler describes how perceptual analysis provides a mechanism that allows infants to begin their journey into conceptual life, and subsequently to enter the advanced worlds of conceptual systems, memory, language, and consciousness. This review provides an overview of Mandler's theoretical position, celebrates…

The articles featured in this issue make apparent the variety of perceptual and cognitive competencies that follow curvilinear developmental courses as well as the complexities inherent in accounting for such phenomena. What is revealed is the way in which a fit is achieved between organisms and the environments they occupy. Curvilinear…

The traditional view of development is stage-like progress toward increasing complexity of form. However, the literature cites many examples in which children do worse before they do better. A major challenge for developmental theory, therefore, is to explain both global progress and apparent regression. In this article, we situate U-shaped…